The problems of a family are often conditioned by the cultural issues its members face, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, most therapeutic models ignore this important factor. Ariel's book offers a model for diagnosis and therapy that incorporates cultural issues. It provides clinicians and trainees with readily applicable concepts, methods, and techniques for helping families and their members overcome difficulties related to intermarriage, immigration, acculturation, socioeconomic inequality, prejudice, and ecological or demographic change. This approach enables therapists to analyze and describe a family as a cultural system, explain its culture-related difficulties, and design and carry out culturally sensitive strategies for solving these difficulties.
This is an introduction to a general integrative model of culturally competent family therapy in which concepts, methods, and findings have been incorporated into a synthesis of various current theories. Drawing upon sources including social and cultural anthropology, sociology, and cross-cultural social psychology, psychiatry and linguistics, 13 chapters present an overview of culture and family therapy, family- cultural concepts relevant to diagnosis and treatment, the information-processing framework, culturally competent family diagnosis, and therapy.